Year: 2015

I’ve had a Google Chromecast (1st generation) for a while now, connected over WiFi. Works great, although sometimes the wireless reception cuts out, or the signal gets saturated. Since I’m mostly streaming from a device which sits less than 10 cm away, it is also rather stupid to have all those packets going back and forth to my router, causing unnecessary load. Google has a nifty solution, the Ethernet Adapter for Chromecast, but it’s 1. rather expensive for what it is (in my opinion), and 2. difficult to get your hands on (in Belgium, where I live).

So, after some digging, enter a DYI solution that works ;) It costs about half, but requires more patience (for delivery).

To install it all: plug the mini-USB power supply (delivered with the Chromecast) into the blue plug, the network dongle into the normal USB plug, and the black connector into the Chromecast. (And an ethernet cable into the network dongle, duh). It should automatically pick up the fact that it’s now connected via ethernet, and other than that… it just works. Enjoy ;)

(Edit: I’ve noticed that this setup does cause plenty of electrical interference… so FM reception becomes nearly impossible. Have to figure out what is real cause)

Unfortunately, it uses a windows application to manage the switches – the 5 and 8 port varieties don’t have a usable built-in web server to manage them. Luckely, there’s a way to make that still work on Linux ;) as it seems that it’s just a JavaFX application. The only thing you’ll ever need a windows installation for (or use Wine) is to install the actual application.

After installation, You’ll find a file called “Easy Smart Configuration Utility.exe” in the installation path. Copy that to your Linux installation, rename to .jar, and you’re good to go.

To run it, you’ll also need the Oracle Java distribution, as JavaFX is not yet part of OpenJDK. Install that in your distribution of choice, and you’ll be able to start the application using java -jar “Easy Smart Configuration Utility.jar” and it’ll start right up.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t work out of the box. The tool doesn’t find any devices on the network, but they are there. Checking with netstat, the tool bound itself on UDP port 29809, on the local ip address.

It seems the tool binds to the local IP instead of the ‘any ip’, 0.0.0.0, so you need to locally forward the traffic incoming on the port to your local ip. To do this, execute this command (and/or add it to your local firewall script):

Back in the day I used to have one router in the house: the D-LinkDIR-825, flashed with OpenWRT. Configured with two SSIDs – one for internal network use, and one for guest access – the latter being separate from the internal network of the flat.

After moving to our house, I discovered that the house construction materials provide a better shielding for radio signals, which in turn meant that the reach of my WiFi router wasn’t quite what it should be to reach the far corners of the place. I tried increasing the output wattage, but that had only a marginal increase in reach. So in the end I opted getting a new primary router – the TP-LinkArcher C5 (though mine has three antennas?), which was promptly reflashed with OpenWRT. The DIR-825 was moved to the opposite corner of the house to increase reach, and at the same time I lowered the output wattage of the radios. Because of time constraints, I didn’t bother stretching the guest wifi to the second router, as it requires a bit more configuration to properly separate the flows of data between the two networks: vlan configuration.

After the latest lan-party with some friends, where we played a lot of Rocket League, it dawned on me that this game (and numerous others) is probably a lot easier to play with a game controller instead of the mouse/keyboard combination. And as I have the WiiMote and the Wii Classic Controller lying around, I thought I’d have a go at getting these to work on Windows (as opposed to buying something new).

Wii Classic Controller

Windows does recognize the WiiMote as some weird bluetooth device, but not as a functional controller. Some digging turned up HID Wiimote driver, the Bachelor Thesis project of Julian Löhr. For the installation instructions, please see the site of Julian – they’re pretty detailed and tell you everything you need to know.

As for mapping the output of the driver to something games understand, you’ll need yet another tool: x360ce. This translates whatever output you get from a driver, and makes the game/program in question think there’s an Xbox360 controller attached. For details on how x360ce works, check the github site.

x360ce main controller mapping screen

One final remark: to make things properly work, make sure you uncheck “Passthrough” in the advanced tab, otherwise it just doesn’t work. And copy the files of x360ce in the game’s binary directory, so that all the necessary libraries will be found.